Paid for a year of data up front. One contract, and I ate the earnest money.

The $2,000 is the part I'd focus on. On a $86,000 contract you had no reason to post that much, and the fact that you let it go hard on a calendar date instead of on a condition you controlled is the whole loss. My diligence checklist for anything remote starts with what happens if the counterparty on the other end doesn't show up, and the answer there was "I lose two grand," which you found out after signing rather than before.

Did the seller ever tell you why he wouldn't extend? Four extra days would have cost him nothing.

I'm mostly here for note stuff so tell me if I'm misreading, but the earnest money going hard, that's just a clause in the purchase agreement saying after day 10 the deposit is non-refundable? Nobody made you write it that way? I'm asking because I keep seeing people talk about earnest money like it's a fixed cost of doing business rather than a number that got typed into a blank.

I don't think the buyer list was the real cause. Your buyers told you $72,000 and under and you'd signed at $86,000. That's a 16% gap. A better buyer list gets you maybe two more names in the same price band, and they'd have said the same thing.

The cause is the $135,000 ARV. You pulled sold comps off a platform in a market you've never driven, and in a low price point city the difference between two streets can be $25,000. Did you have anyone local look at the block? Because that's the check that catches this, and it costs $75 and a phone call.

@thicket has it half right. If the ARV was wrong then the deal was dead at signing and no buyer would have saved it. But @anchor also couldn't have known it was wrong, because he had no local read to test it against, and the way you get a local read cheaply is to have a buyer who already owns three houses in that zip code tell you what he'd pay. Same fix either way. Buyers first.

@anchor, the prepaid year is the piece I'd argue with least, honestly. $1,188 is a rounding error next to $2,000 you didn't have to spend.

One thing worth checking on this before you go again: some states now have specific rules about how a wholesaler markets a property they've only got under contract, and a couple require written disclosure to the seller that you intend to assign rather than buy. Those requirements are different state to state and they change, so an attorney licensed where you're working is the only real answer. I bring it up because your seller kept your $2,000 and shrugged, and a seller who feels misled about what you were actually doing is exactly the seller who gets less friendly than that.

Four months and $5,300 to learn the order of operations. Not the worst tuition I've read on here.

The $600 a month caller is the line I'd have cut first, not last. I run a small team and the thing I've learned is that you don't hire out a step you can't yet evaluate. You had someone dialing sellers for three months while you had no idea what a good conversation sounded like in that market or what the exit price was. You paid $1,800 to generate a problem.

If I were rebuilding it, I'd dial 100 sellers myself, badly, before anyone else touched the phone. You need to hear the objections in your own ear.

@anchor, you said you picked the market because the price points were low and the sellers looked motivated. Cheap markets are cheap because the demand side is thin. That's not a rule, but it's often true, and thin demand is exactly what killed you. The markets where you can find twelve real buyers in a week are markets where the entry price is higher and the spread is tighter, and you have to decide which of those two problems you'd rather have.

I'd add that you now know the actual buy box in that city, $72,000 for that shape of house. That's worth something, if you go back.